I find it interesting that people with little or no experience from teaching claims that now people have tried out Zoom and it works (kind of), education can go online at once.

I wish it was that simple, trust me, there is more to teaching online than having Zoom.

@jemostrom Agree. Out of curiosity... are you allowed to use Zoom? Here it is forbidden for security reasons.

@svenseebeck Yes, it one of the supported platforms (FWIW Zoom seem to do a pretty good job of increasing security ... at least fixing the obvious flaws). Higher Education in Sweden runs services like this in collaboration and as I understand is actually running an enterprise version of Zoom on their own servers ... I don't know if it makes any difference security wise.

We're in kind of a transition period right now, we're supposed to switching communication platforms (Skype for Business => Microsoft Teams, Sakai => Canvas, etc) but things have been delayed due to the pandemic. Not that I or my students use these tools much - they seem to prefer Git, Discord, Google Docs, etc.

@jemostrom Yes, here in public schools it's also Teams. Works fine. Since I (luckily) don't have to teach large groups and only one to one lessons I tend to uses what works with the students, so its a bit all over the place. Skype, Teams, Duo and even WhatsApp.

@svenseebeck My current course has 60 students. But I had a student from previous course finishing it this morning and then we used Skype.

@jemostrom I do not envy you. Working from home hasn’t been a huge change for me as my current duties already had me doing mostly computer work coupled with a lot of teleconferencing with remote groups. Teaching is a much different thing.

@jemostrom I do not envy you. Working from home hasn’t been a huge change for me as my current duties already had me doing mostly computer work coupled with a lot of teleconferencing with remote groups. Teaching is a much different thing.

@tgray In my current course (Software Engineering) it's pretty much the same thing for me personally. A few lectures but otherwise Scrum meetings and other similar stuff.

And since I have the corresponding hardware at home (in some cases better), approximately the same network connectivity (I've had fiber connection for 15+ years), etc, it basically doesn't matter that I'm at home ... OK, there is one thing: I miss my 20+ year old office chair from work, I got a newer fancy chair for free but it's not as good as my old one.

I would definitely be open for a remote-work developer position.

But I suspect that it's more of a problem for the students, they don't really know each other that well but now they have to form groups, decide on architecture, chose tools, etc, etc, just using online communication.

We have had a number guest lecturers from industry and they said "great, this is how we work" ... well, I hardly think that they are starting a new project from scratch with 60 people who haven't worked together before 😝

@jemostrom I gotta say, for me and my students the move online works really well. A lot better than I had thought if somebody has asked me three months ago. And you are probably right about the difficulties for students that don’t know each other. My students have all had 30 weeks of campus studies together so they are quite a tight group already.

@jemostrom I have the same experience. A few of my students speak up in the large group but it’s pretty much the same students that used to talk the most in lectures on campus as well. In smaller groups it works much better. The breakout rooms of Zoom is a nice tool for that. The chat is a different beast. There they tend to be quite chatty. Lot’s of good questions, and sometimes answers to each others questions, and also quite a lot of internet humour, text based memes, etc. In one lecture I had to tell them to back off on the silliness in the chat so valuable questions and/or answers didn’t disappear in the flood of jokes.